The Talent Hackers Blog

Top 10 things for startups and founders to think about when choosing their technology platform and hiring.

As a founder or senior leader within your startup, have you asked yourself these questions and got answers you are happy with, if not make the time to work through them, you could regret it later down the line especially when you do finally get investment.

1. Are there staff available in the local area?It might be obvious but it is amazing how many startups will go with the latest technology like Scala, paper.js, Clojure or Slate, Faust or Squirrel and build an amazing new product but then when they try to recruit the extra programmer they really struggle to hire. Spend some time thinking about where you can find the skills locally or will you have to cross train or relocate talent. Even languages that are becoming more mainstream like Ruby can be difficult to obtain. Resources like IT jobswatch can give you an idea of demand, a quick search on Linkedin might give an indication of supply.

2. What are the rates for permanent/contract staff for your technology stack?Assuming you are going with your favoured technology when you are preparing your cashflow and hiring plans, take a look at salaries/contract margins. Many startups are amazed at what they might have to pay to get that right skillset especially outside of London where the assumption is to pay less, but competition is really hot for tech skills right now.

3. Where are the big technology companies that use your skillset?One of the reasons that clusters grow especially around technologies is that there happens to be a large employer of that skillset locally. The reason there were so many start ups in California was Xerox Parc, so many embedded software companies in Cambridge was Acorn and networking technologies in Scotland was NCR and 3Com. Have you looked at the local big tech employers and their tech stack to see if its easy to get people from there.

4. Are you part of a community already?Have you joined and are active in the local User Groups, Meetups?This will give you an idea of the quality and depth of local talent.

5. UniversitiesHave you made links with the local universities, especially the Computer Science courses? One reason for successful startups around York was the quality of their C Science course especially around AI and Vision.

6. What happens when you get funded? Do you have a planOne of the key bottlenecks for startups is planning, from building and launching a product, creating great customer service and doing the investment rounds when you finally get that magic funding, typically a lot of it will go on hiring. If you have not pipelined and thought about how to do this it can create a major challenge for companies.

7. It's OK, we will just bring in overseas candidates!Think again, the average time to hire, process and gain a work permit is likely to be around 3-6 months especially if they are not in the country already. On top of which, Visa's are becoming much scarcer now under new legislation. Yes you can still hire from within the EU, but the competition is fierce and most candidates want to live in London as that is the area they know.

8. Beware the unicorn!

While research suggests that recruiting the top 5% of programmers will have a disproportionate effect on your productivity, the reality is they are few and far between for a reason and you have to pay disproportionate salaries and benefits to attract them and present them with the right challenges otherwise they will move on swiftly. A good solid team to start will pay good dividends and if you see one them make a decision then otherwise you could miss delivering waiting for the unicorn.

9. Are you attractive compared to your peers?

Have you undertaken a review of your hiring competition? Not just the local startups but major employers, startups within 1 hours commute which if you are in Nottingham, Birmingham or Manchester could almost be London to see how you stack up on benefits, culture and salaries?

10. Do you actually tell people you are hiring!

A common issue for startups is to focus on their product and sales and not have their website telling people they are hiring or what they are looking for in the future. The key is to make sure that its very visible on the front page.

If you would like to get a free review of hiring practices at your startup or just advice on where you might be able to improve then pick up the phone to Peter on 01299 833980

One of the hardest things to do as a Non-Technical Co-founder is to recruit a CTO who can join the company later but still share in the passion that you have for the product. With the rise of accelerators, hands-on investors and easy options to build a MVP and launch, many CEO’s are finding that they have so much to run from the business and client end, that they are in difficulty when it comes time to find the CTO.

Launching through having your product built by a third party, or a friend is great and is a really cost effective way to get to MVP, however it creates a legacy of technical debt and potentially difficult code or technology stacks that might not be right to scale the product. This is where the CTO or Lead Developer is really key to taking you through to the next level.

At this point the CEO or COO will be heavily engaged in running teams, working with clients, mapping feature sets and reporting to the board and their main constraints are around time as well as funding the hiring of a new CTO. Using agencies can be costly, 25% of salary is not a small amount, doing it through friends, referrals and networking can take forever with the board increasing the pressure to hire every month.

I recently worked on a project for a client to do exactly this and though it might be useful to share our experience of this.

The total amount of time to hire was 55 hours, this included setting up job postings, reaching out through LinkedIn, searching job boards, tele screening candidates, organising technical screens and skype interviews with the CEO, COO, investors and finally closing the deal with the candidate.

That’s probably the average week for a CEO but ask one you know if they could afford the time to do this.

We reached out to over 250 candidates directly, managed over 80 advertising responses, had over 10 direct referrals across multiple sources.

We posted across Europe, headhunted, networked and drove the process on, keeping our candidates in the process during August when everyone was on holiday, giving consistent feedback to candidates and managing communications.

What did the company gain, we hope that candidates got a better view of the company, had a better experience and due to implementing a workflow system called Workable are able to build a talent pool that will be receptive to them the next time they hire.

What were the learning points.

· Hiring from Europe can mean great candidates who are prepared to work for less, but the advertising platforms are not great yet to attract them.

· Referrals are great especially from investors.

· You can spend a lot of money with little ROI on new platforms.

· Speed is of the essence, having a streamlined process is ultra-effective, longer than 2 weeks to hire means you lose candidates

· Everybody needs to be bought into the process.

· Reaching out through Linkedin or other platforms is more effective than anything.

What was the end result? For under 30% of the cost of an agency, a slick process and the opportunity to build an ATS, we hired a great CTO, did it in a reasonable time frame and the CEO spent less than 5 hours in actual interviewing. That’s a good result!

TheTalentHackers.com are a inhouse recruitment service for startups and fastgrowth companies in the Technology, Bio and Mobile world. To find out more visit www.thetalenthackers.com